Chapter 2
Daphne
“You want me to do what?!”
“It’s the fastest way down, ma’am,” said the officer gesturing to a belay seat I was supposed to strap myself into so I could freaking rappel into the ravine under the train tracks.
My forehead felt prickly. I was seconds from breaking out in a sweat, despite the frigid temperatures.
I took a long, deep breath. Okay. I can do this. I had to. Only one way down was faster, and that route ended with me never coming back up.
I stepped closer to the edge of the embankment, taking a deep breath and daring myself to look over. It wasn’t a ninety-degree drop-off. From here, it didn’t even look so steep that we couldn’t walk it. That’s how the first few officers had gotten down there initially, to confirm the remains were human.
Then again, they were probably very athletic. I was clumsy. I never knew when my joints might decide to roly-poly on me. Because of that, I could concede strapped in was a good plan, but rappelling?
“Need help?” I spun around to find Chris already in his belay seat and ready to go. It should have looked ridiculous over his fancy wool trousers, but he was too elegant to look ridiculous in anything, including a trouser-bunching rock-climbing harness topped with a fancy wool coat and expensive-looking shoes.
Of course his shoes were expensive. He was a single dentist, professor, and one of the most preeminent forensic odontologists in the world. He was in his mid-thirties, maybe? He probably made bank and had no financial obligations other than to himself. The man owned a custom luxury supercar.
So yeah, why wouldn’t his shoes be expensive? I’d have expensive shoes, too.
He reached for my harness and kneeled in the dirt at my feet. Automatically. Like it was nothing to help a helpless plebe about to descend to her death.
I focused on his fancy shoes instead of my impending fall and severed spinal cord.
He didn’t wear them like they were expensive. He wore them like they were just shoes. Ordinary, everyday shoes. Like how I wore my Army boots.
He was probably so accustomed to the finer things, he didn’t even notice how fine they were. He didn’t strut around like some men, showing off the one faddish, semi-luxury item they owned, blasting it in your face like you should be impressed they bought some expensive, but still very mid shit.
Chris didn’t have to flash his wealth by making a show of looking at a blingy watch. He’d lent me his cashmere scarf and fur-lined gloves after knowing me all of ten minutes, as if they were disposable. I would have had to save up for the better part of a year to buy a cashmere scarf, and even then, I probably would have used the savings to buy something more practical—like food, or a phone that held a charge longer than two hours.
He didn’t fuss or fidget trying to keep his shoulders erect in his expertly tailored coat. All his clothes were surely about to be ruined, and he didn’t seem to care at all.
This was more than dentist money. This was old money. The kind of quiet luxury the rich didn’t even notice.
Maybe he’d fallen through the cracks of time and was really a peer of the realm from Regency England.
“Step in.”
“You know what you’re doing?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“That’s it? Just ‘yes’? You rappel into a lot of odontology cases?”
“Right leg through here,” he said calmly, holding the loop open for me. “Not for the job. I’ve just climbed a lot.”
Hmm. Rock climbing could also be old money. No one I knew did it, so that automatically made it feel like an activity for wealthy people.
Chris probably did dressage or show jumping too. And fencing. Definitely fencing.
Now I was imagining him in a fitted black jacket, tight-ass riding breeches, and knee-high, shiny leather boots, and I didn’t want to see him in anything else. I bet his thighs would look amazing in riding breeches.
“Left leg.”
“Did you ever fence?”
“What?”
“Fence. You know—en garde? The Princess Bride ?”
He looked at me quizzically. “No. Decca has a friend who does, if you’re interested. She’s the only person I know who fences.”
“Ride horses?”
“Daph, put your other leg through.” He tapped my calf. “Once. And I don’t want to repeat the experience.”
I stepped into the second loop, trying to ignore the easy way he shortened my name. As if it was a term of endearment rather than an ordinary nickname. It was like he’d been saying it forever, had known me forever.
“Archery, maybe? Or, like... flintlock pistols? I think that’s what they’re called. Do you use those?”
He laughed. “For what? Dueling Aaron Burr? What’s with the questions?” Good. At least I hadn’t offended him.
“I’m trying to figure out what you were like as a kid.”
“You thought I..." He said something under his breath before shaking his head and smiling up at me. “The guns sound cool, but the only swords I’ve held were probably... I don’t know, toy lightsabers. I don’t know what sort of impression I give off, but I’m from Nashville. I played soccer. I skateboarded. Video games.”
Okay, so he maybe wasn’t a nineteenth century duke who’d fallen through a wormhole into a twenty-first century not-quite-a-crime scene. That just meant I hadn’t found the right archetype for him yet.
“Are you disappointed?” He said it like a joke, but the nervous way he was avoiding my eyes was sending my insides on a roller coaster loop.
“That you’re normal? No. I’m glad you’re real. I just wondered how you became... you.”
Chris took a breath and focused entirely too hard on strapping me in. He pulled the loops up over my knees but stopped just short of adjusting the flat rope across my upper thighs. “Uh, maybe you want to do this?”
My cheeks grew hot from the way he looked at me from behind those glasses, sincere— always sincere —and a little embarrassed to be touching me in such an intimate place, even if it needed to be done. The harness hadn’t been an issue for Decca; one of the officers had gotten her done up in no time at all, without the red cheeks and stuttering and sudden inability to make eye contact on either end.
I inched the harness into place over the bunching sweatpants I’d borrowed from one of the male officers—luckily, since I wasn’t about to dangle from a rope on a freezing cold morning in just my tights and a miniskirt. Decca had called me up this morning, and I’d rushed here. I was dressed for Christmas shopping and caroling at Mom’s house this evening, not rock climbing.
“I play the piano,” he said quietly as he tugged the straps around my inner thighs tighter, strategically un-bunching the fleece so it wouldn’t twist while I was on belay. “Stop fidgeting.”
“I can’t help it.”
The way he was bent over, tightening and adjusting the harness and keeping his fingers carefully away from my crotch and my ass—even though that was exactly where they were supposed to be—was... hot. It also meant his face was directly in line with mine and only inches away. I could lean forward and brush my lips across the hollow of his freshly shaved cheek. I could probably smell old money cologne if I inhaled deeply enough. Whatever that smelled like.
I leaned closer, as close as social decorum would allow me get to an almost-stranger. But all I could smell was... woods. Dirt. The briny scent of incoming snow.
He tugged some more, practically wrestling the harness into place over the giant pants. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed. I wanted to run my tongue down his throat, along his strong square jaw, and close my mouth just there, where his heartbeat pulsed. If he didn’t step away in about five seconds, I’d do it, too. Once an image popped into my head, my impulse control plummeted right off a cliff. Which, incidentally, was the action my real-life body was about to imitate.
“I wanted to be a concert pianist,” he said.
“Oh.” I basically breathed out the word.
He looked at me. At my mouth. Then went back to his task.
“I thought that might tie in with your hoity-toity perception of me.”
“Oh! No. You’re not hoity-toity. Well, not in a bad way. You’re a duke. Sorry. It’s silly. It’s just a thing I do. I... rearrange people into different eras and archetypes, and it’s... really embarrassing and classist. I was imagining you as a historic manorial landowner. A Mr. Darcy type, working the fields alongside your tenants.”
He cocked his head in surprise. “Darcy wasn’t a lord, but I’m flattered by the comparison.” He stood up. “Well, that’s about as good as it gets.”
“That’s not at all reassuring.”
“Ready?”
“No way.”
“Go behind me.” He smiled his lopsided smile, the one that was making my insides twist in the most wonderful way. “I’ll catch you if you fall.”
“Alright, folks. I’ve got halls to deck and wassail to brew,” Decca said, once we’d retrieved the remains and the cadaver dogs had swept the area.
“What even is wassail?” I asked Decca.
“It’s what you drink on Christmas,” Chris turned to me with his lazy smile and mischievous eyes. “If you’re a duke.”
Oh. I was in trouble.
“I’m officially turning this case over to Dr. Carter. Daph, do you mind assisting him?”
Sure. If by “assist,” she meant tripping over my own feet and boring him to death with my nonsense factoids and inane questions. But that wasn’t the real issue. I took a deep breath, about to show my underbelly to the woman who was my idol.
“Uh, actually, I was hoping to catch a ride with you. I don’t have a car.”
“How’d you get here?” Decca asked.
“Uber.”
“You Ubered to a crime scene?”
“It’s not a crime. They’re historic remains. Never mind. I’ll ask one of the cops to drop me off at a library or something, so I can ride-share from there. It’s just like... twenty miles back to Franklin.”
“What happened to your Firebird?”
“Everything happened to it. I couldn’t afford to drive it home, so when I got into town yesterday, I drove straight to the junker my dad knows. He gave me barely enough for it to cover gas and the two cases of oil I had to put into it on the way out here.”
“Shit. How are you getting back to Knoxville?”
“Dad’ll pick me up tomorrow. When my stipend comes in, I’m going to use some of it for a down payment on a slightly less-used treasure that was once someone’s trash. Hopefully old enough that I can still do the maintenance on it myself. I don’t trust modern cars.”
“Modern cars? Please at least get something from this millennium.” Decca grabbed my phone out of my hand. “And use my Uber login. As your former lead on this case, I insist on covering your transportation while you’re in my town. I don’t want you to be stranded anywhere.” She looked at me with concern. “I’ll have Chris drop you at your mom’s when you’re done here. Don’t worry. He’d never do anything that wasn’t one hundred percent gentlemanly.” She gave me a pointed expression that seemed to mean more to her than it did to me.
“I’m sure he’s got stuff going on. I don’t want him to feel obli—”
“Hey, Chris..." Decca shouted to where he was hunched over a table, pushing up his glasses in a way that made him look like a little boy. Something happened to my cheeks whenever I looked at him. To the casual observer, it would look like I was merely blushing, but I knew better. If you looked deeper, it was like I was being x-rayed. Only, instead of seeing my bones, it was all my sexual fantasies playing on a flickering film reel. And when it came to Dr. Christopher Carter, I had a big canister of film hidden inside me.
Chris looked up, his eyebrows shooting above his eyeglass frames in question.
“Give Daph a ride home after?”
He didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even drop his brows. He held that shocked little boy expression as he glanced at me, then quickly back to Decca before nodding once and returning his attention to the skull.
That was odd. But it meant I got to ride in a brand-new AMG GT, so...
“I’ll see you later, doll. Try to be at my house by eight o’clock if you can’t make it by dinner. We’re playing Dickensian party games. You won’t want to miss them.”
“The Minister’s Cat?”
“Of course!” She shouted back, over her shoulder.
I knew who was coming to Decca’s party, and I suspected she and I would be the only willing participants in tonight’s revelry.
I scooped up the packing material Decca had left for the remains and started to organize it below the table. We’d found a few more bone fragments besides the skull, although nothing helpful like a femur—something that could help us accurately guess the decedent’s height. All in all, the remains included a complete skull with mandible—detached, of course, but that it was there at all had been a nice surprise. The jaw was usually carried off by animals. Decca had assured me the three-inch-long one on the table was a third metatarsal. Because it was almost the same length, and had the same facets as a first metacarpal, I couldn’t yet eyeball the difference like Decca or Chris could. There was also a spinous process, broken off from one vertebra, and a few small unidentified bones—although I’d go out on a limb to say one of them was a superior articular process of a different vertebra.
Chris was examining the cranium.
We were so lucky to have an intact skull.
“What do you make of it?” he asked, not looking at me as I stood at the plastic folding table opposite him.
“Um..."
He nestled the cranium into its jaw like a lopsided frame. “Age, sex, race? Anything interesting?” He gestured to the nearly toothless grin.
“Oh.” I focused my attention down. “Uh... male.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Any of these cops could probably tell you that. What else?”
“The brow ridge is very... um, overly... prominent. And straight. More so than average.”
“Is it?” He was studying me now.
“I think so. Um.” Stop saying um. “Getting a date on the skull will be difficult. It’s been partially buried face down for a long time. That’s why the parietal bone is bleached and the facial bones are brown. The back of the skull was exposed to the sun and the elements.”
“Why?” He drilled.
“Animals?”
“Most likely. It accounts for why we can’t find the rest of him. Animals gnaw on the skull last. Hard to get their jaws around it. It’s a lot easier to take off with a femur or a rib. Which is partly what led us to believe these are historic remains. They must have been buried so long, all organic matter was completely decomposed long before he was unearthed.”
“If they’d been uncovered sooner, before total decomp, they’d have more teeth marks?” I asked.
I’d read that information so many times. It made sense in the textbooks, but this was my first time seeing it in situ. Things were clicking into place, but I knew I wasn’t about to flood him with the heat of my competence this time. I just tried not to sound like a total noob.
“Yes, and you were right earlier, too. The brow ridge hasn’t changed that drastically in modern history. He was a weird looking dude, even before 1920.”
Okay, what else? “Caucasian. The nasal spine is broken, but there’s a narrow nasal opening and interorbital breadth, plus the sloping eye orbits.”
“Good.”
My body flooded with warmth from his praise. I needed more.
“Age..." I shook my head. “May I?” I gestured to the skull.
He nodded, watching me intently, with a curiosity that thrilled me.
I gently gripped the cranium by its temporal bones, which didn’t appear as fragile as the rest of it. It easily lifted off the mandible, since there was no tissue connecting the bones.
It was the first time I’d held human remains in my bare hands. Even during undergrad, I’d worked mostly with plastic replicas, since the real human teaching skeletons were expensive, and they rarely let us undergrads play with them. On field studies, and working with Decca, I’d never actually had the authority to touch anything.
Letting the weight of this moment sink in, I saw myself in my career for the first time. This was exactly what I was born to do. Maybe I was rushing it. I still had another two years of learning—tramping over bloated corpses at The Body Farm, learning how to do this stuff without Chris or Decca prompting me. But soon enough, I’d be able to tell a third metatarsal from a first metacarpal with a single glance.
I carefully inverted the cranium and looked at the few intact teeth. “Wisdom teeth in place. Wear on the bicuspid. There’s enough remodeling to suggest he lost a lot of his teeth premortem. I don’t know—sixties? Seventies? His underbite game was strong, like a bulldog. You can see the grinding here.” I pointed.
“Underbite game?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Mesiocclusion,” I rephrased.
“Thank you.”
My thumb brushed across a series of shallow ridges on the squamous part of the temporal bone.
“What’s..." I squinted but couldn’t see much. “This feels... anthropogenic.” But that couldn’t be.
“Where?” He grew serious.
“Left temporal. Right above the zygomatic arch. It’s too even, too perfect. You can feel it better than see it. Here.” I held his hand and placed the pad of his finger on the exact spot I’d felt the marks. But he wasn’t looking at the skull. He was looking at me with that same odd blend of curiosity and fire. His chocolate irises darkened as his chest rose heavily.
“It’s… uh, probably nothing.” His mind seemed elsewhere, but I could tell he didn’t sound convinced either. “More teeth marks. Maybe from a premolar.” He took the skull from me, his thumb brushing mine across the orbital socket as it slipped from my hands. “I can see why Decca hired you. You know what you’re doing.”
He said it more to the skull than to me, but it was the best compliment I’d ever received.
Once we’d packed up, Chris gestured awkwardly to his car, as if my heart wasn’t racing just thinking about nestling into its creamy leather seats. There was an odd moment where he hesitated and veered to the passenger side before straightening again. Was he going to open my door? Why did this feel like a date? Did it feel that way to him, too?
He tucked the small box of carefully packed human remains into the trunk. The scent of leather and new car that wafted out made my knees weak. I couldn’t wait to get in, feel how she drove, feel how he drove.
“I feel like classical music should be pumped in wherever you walk. Like a tiny Bluetooth speaker. What am I going to discover when you start the car?”
“Never know. Could be Mozart. Could be Mahler.” He raised his eyebrows. The brown of his eyes flashed for a second, but he didn’t even quirk a smile before folding his long body into the small car.
I moaned once our doors shut. “I forgot what it was like to be out of the wind.”
He pressed the button, and the engine purred to life.
“Oh, I don’t know about Mahler, but this is the soundtrack of my heart right here. I could listen to this all day.” I jerked my head toward him, my joints not fully thawed yet. “Did you know that Carl Benz was about to give up on his invention of the first internal combustion engine when his wife, Bertha, stole his car and drove it cross-country through Germany as a PR stunt?”
“I heard something like that.”
“She was an engineer as well, even though she wasn’t allowed to study in school. She came up with the idea for brake pads. And she invested her own money in her husband’s company, but her name never made it on the books because wives weren’t able to be listed as investors then. She’s kind of my hero.”
“I can see why,” he said quietly. Everything about him was quiet and still, opposite my frenetic verbosity. Being near him even made me feel calmer.
When the music roared to life, it was decidedly not classical. It was… rap. Something about Wu-Tang. I’d heard of the Wu-Tang Clan but had never actually listened to them. It was raw and powerful—nothing at all like what I would have pictured from his old money shoes and tortoiseshell eyeglasses.
“Not classical. Still out of my wheelhouse. And my generation. I like it, though.”
He smiled patiently. “It’s before my time, too.”
“Is there a story behind it?”
“Yes and no. I listen to all kinds of music, so this isn’t out of my norm. But there was a man who worked with my parents—Darius. When I was a teenager, I really looked up to him. He became kind of a second father to me. Always had Wu-Tang playing. When I come home, I get nostalgic, I guess.”
“How old are you, Chris?”
“Older than you.”
“Oh, come on. I’ll pick your pocket and sneak a peek at your driver’s license,” I said, giddily.
“Thirty-six.”
“Oh. You look thirty-six.”
“Disappointed?” He seemed amused rather than offended. Good.
“Only because I missed the chance to prove to you that I could, in fact, pick your pocket.”
“I’ve seen your nimble fingers. It doesn’t surprise me you have a gift for sleight of hand.” He merged onto another road and accelerated effortlessly, flicking the paddle with his pretty hands. “So...?”
“So what?” He was melting me into the seats and rendering me incapable of following my own train of thought.
“How old are you?”
“Oh. Twenty-four.” Would he think I was too young?
Chris wasn’t that much older than me. He certainly didn’t feel it, despite his air of general ducalness. Quiet and composed did not equal old. I’d known plenty of kids who were quiet and composed. I’d been quiet and composed as a kid. But everyone knows how to play when they get comfortable. I suspected, deep down, Chris knew how to play. He’d just been kicking at the loose rocks on the playground until the right person came along to chase him onto the monkey bars.
He wasn’t even the type who needed me—your stereotypical ADHD manic pixie dream girl—to show him how to let his hair down and roll with the punches.
He was a bone geek, a death worker. His hair was already down. He rolled.
There’d always been a disconnect with my dating life, and it was one hundred percent because of me.
The unfairness of it all was that my neurodivergent, trauma-informed brain made me impulsive, up for anything, great in emergencies or morally ambiguous situations, but I didn’t get any of the fun parts. I wasn’t a free spirit; I was riddled with anxiety. My life wasn’t a playground; it was a hellscape where I’d been left alone to parent myself from a young age and never given the tools to do it.
I looked like trouble, but I was traditional. I’d been blue collar, but I liked bougie. I liked security, warmth, and home. My goals involved one day having a closet full of black sheath dresses and season tickets to the symphony.
Something about Chris and his untapped boyishness made me think he might be the one to see me how I saw me . He just might be my opposite—the Mercedes to my Benz. Here he was, in his car that was fancy, but not flashy—which obviously meant he valued quality craftsmanship—yet he was accelerating into traffic like an Indy driver instead of a hesitant old man.
He wore exquisitely tailored, side-buckle trousers and a cashmere pullover, but I hadn’t once seen him brush off the dust or the mud flecks. Plus, we were listening to some pretty hardcore nineties rap.
And I was pretty sure he was doing some heavy flirting on an almost-crime scene.
Maybe he was my manic pixie dream boy.
Maybe we could teach each other how to live and be and love.
I reached for the knob to turn up the music at the same time he reached for the heat controls. The backs of our fingers bumped, and I quickly shoved my hands between my thighs.
“Are you cold?” A line formed between his brows, as if my comfort were the most serious thing in the world. God, he was handsome. His sincerity, his style, his silly droopy smile, the way his elegant hands curled around the shifter panel, easing through the gears with the tips of his fingers.
Every now and then, his eyes drifted over to the strip of sheer black tights between where my skirt ended and my thigh-high socks began.
I hid my smile.
The rest of the drive was filled with companionable silence. Under normal circumstances, I’d be nervous as hell, compulsively picking at my black nail polish that hadn’t yet started to chip. I was no good at flirting or banter. I’d rather spew random facts about the Gilded Age or talk about how Mercedes Benz was the first automobile to develop four-wheel suspension than pretend I was incompetent just to stroke a man’s ego. But being with Chris made me feel different—mature and grounded. Comfortable.
I could get used to this.